


richie tozier: not an asthmatic

by walmartofficial



Series: a little bit funny [1]
Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Pennywise (IT), Established Relationship, Long-Term Relationship(s), M/M, Netflix Specials, Stand Up Comedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 12:11:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20742008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/walmartofficial/pseuds/walmartofficial
Summary: “I’m getting word that I’m not allowed to tell this joke,” he tells the audience, “but it was gonna be about eating ass, if that wasn’t clear.”





	richie tozier: not an asthmatic

**Author's Note:**

> i know there’s already 200 fics exactly like this but the concept is just so fun i couldn’t resist 
> 
> fair warning: it’s incredibly short for a netflix special but i guess that’s showbiz for you ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

The lights, when Richie steps out onto the stage, are so bright they’re almost blinding. There’s a spotlight around him as he crosses towards the microphone, waving at the massive crowd that cheers for him, so loudly that he can feel it in his teeth. It’s one of the biggest shows he’s ever done, to one of the largest crowds. The theatre is enormous, the thousands of seats are all filled, and this is the show they’re filming for his first Netflix special. 

It’s a fucking amazing feeling. There isn’t anything like it in the world. 

He lifts his hand again, an awkward sort of half wave as he takes his place in front of the microphone. He grins, too big and too toothy and probably really goofy, so wide he can feel the strain of it in his jaw. He lets the crowd cheer for him for a moment, basking in the sound of it, before he leans in and says through a laugh, “thanks, guys.” 

They cheer some more. Somebody whistles for him. Something warm and indescribably happy bubbles up in his chest. “Thank you,” he says again. “Nobody looks like they wanna be here, but thank you.” 

He reaches for the water bottle on the stool standing next to him, unscrewing the cap as the cheering finally slows, then quiets. “Seriously,” he says. “I can’t see very far but everybody in my direct line of vision looks bored as shit.

“You do,” he insists, when they laugh. “I haven’t even started yet and you’re already over it. It’s really - it’s humbling. They’re filming this for Netflix, too, so I’m gonna have this _forever_. Which is - it’s kinda nice, right? If I ever get too full of myself I can look back at your bored faces waiting for my set to be over and it’ll - it’ll help keep me in check. It’ll keep me humble. 

“Thanks for coming out, anyway,” he adds, pausing just long enough to take a sip of water, putting the bottle back down as he says, “even though you clearly don’t wanna be here.” A laugh ripples through the audience, and it makes Richie feel lighter than he has in a long time. “I get it, man,” he says. “I get it. You got the night off, you got a bit of free time, it’s beautiful outside, and you’re sitting here watching a dude in a Hawaiian shirt tell jokes. I wouldn’t wanna be where you are, either,” he admits. “Are you kidding? That sounds like a terrible time. I couldn’t fucking believe it when they told me I sold out this theatre. There’s so many fucking seats in here and there’s an actual person in all of them. What the fuck’s wrong with all of you? Did you really have nothing better to do?” 

He’s answered with more laughter, and he grins. “I appreciate it, though, really. I don’t know - I don’t know how many of you have seen any of my older stuff -“ He stops, cut short but a ripple of enthusiasm from the audience. “Fuck, okay. A lot of you,” Richie corrects. “That sucks. I used to be terrible. Thanks for giving me a second chance.” 

Another chorus of laughter that makes Richie feel almost lightheaded. “I’m serious,” he says. “I wasn’t good. There isn’t even a joke here,” he adds, “I just want to make sure everybody knows to keep their expectations low.” 

He pushes his hair out of his face, grinning at the laughter that follows. “Y’know,” he says, “I was in high school when I decided I wanted to be a comedian. I’d always been a bit of a performer, y’know? I was a really - I never took anything very seriously as a kid. I made a lot of jokes, and most of them were bad, but _sometimes_ they weren’t bad and people would laugh. And I _thrived_ on that shit as a kid. I loved making people laugh. 

“I remember the first time I told somebody I actually wanted to do it for a living,” he says. He nudges his glasses up his nose as he grins. “It was my best friend. It was the summer before senior year and we were sitting in my basement, and - and I remember all of this so vividly, by the way,” he adds. “I’m not making any of this up. I have so many pointless details from that day just fucking cemented into my memory. He was wearing red short shorts, we were listening to Shout At The Devil on vinyl, and we were both _so_ fucking stoned. And at one point, totally out of the blue, I look at him and I tell him, ‘I think I wanna be a comedian.’” He unscrews the cap on the bottle again, taking a sip before he places it back down. “And this is my best friend, right? He’s high as shit, and he’s looking at me like I’d told him I wanted to be a fucking wizard or something. And he says to me -“ he starts, and laughs at the memory, “he says to me, dead fucking serious, ‘Richie, you’re not funny.’” 

The crowd roars with laughter, and Richie throws his hands up, faux exasperated, pushing his hair back out of his face. “Fucking tell me about it. And did you know what I did?” He waits until the crowd settles again, for dramatic effect, before he crows, “I fucking married that guy!” 

The crowd erupts into cheers again, and Richie grins, wide and goofy and stupidly happy. “I know!” He agrees. “Somebody agreed to marry me! Can you fucking believe it?” 

The crowd cheers again, nearly a roar. He doesn’t think that at seventeen, convinced that he wanted to be a comedian, he’d even be able to fathom that one day he’d be able to get on a stage and say any of this shit. It’s an unbelievable feeling. “I know!” He agrees again, once the crowd starts to quiet. “Look at me up here. He could do better. But he fucking _didn’t_ so I’ve got that shit on lock.” 

A laugh works its’ way through the crowd, and he grins again. “I’m serious. He’s so much better looking than I am. He’s right - he’s here, actually,” he says, and points right at Eddie, who’s sitting in the front row to the left of Bill and Stan. Eddie immediately covers his face, and Richie can’t help the grin that splits across his face. “You can’t see him, but I’m gonna keep pointing at him because he hates it. I love you, baby,” he says, leaning closer to the microphone to make it louder and a bit discordant. 

Eddie only lifts his head to flip him off. Richie grins. “He’s giving me the finger now,” he parrots, for the sake of the audience, before he leans closer to the microphone again to say, “but he’s still gonna let me hit it in our hotel room after this so who’s the real winner here?” 

The crowd roars with laughter, and Richie grins again, watching Eddie redden. “I actually didn’t run that joke by him before I got up here,” Richie admits, “so my chances of getting to hit it after this are actually very slim. But it was worth it!” He insists. “I just - I like to let people know that he has sex with me. I -“ 

It’s another chorus of laughter that interrupts him, and he bubbles out a laugh of his own. “I’m serious! He’s so much better looking than me it’s ridiculous. It’s - I have an anecdote for this, actually. We went out to dinner a couple days ago, and our waitress gave us two separate bills. She didn’t even ask, she just handed us each a bill, and I’m a gentleman, obviously -“ 

A playful jeer sounds from the crowd. “Go fuck yourselves,” Richie says. “I’m a gentleman. And I’m pretty sure I picked the place, so I take Eddie’s bill, and I’m like whatever, it’s not a big deal, I’ll cover them both. And the waitress, as I’m giving her my card, is like, ‘that’s so sweet. I wish my friends paid for me when we go out to dinner together.’” His eyes nearly roll back in his head, even as he says it. “So I tell her, y’know, ‘he’s actually my husband.’ And the look on her fucking face was - she wasn’t even surprised, it was - seriously, you could see it in her face, she didn’t believe me. She actually looked at Eddie, like she was trying to catch me in this lie, but he just kinda shows her his wedding ring so she - she looks at me again and she says, ‘good for you.’” 

The crowd laughs again. Richie does, too. “I swear to God. This is how people talk to me.” He grins at the crowd, taking another sip of water before he clears his throat. “I’m just throwing this out to Netflix, but I want a lot of cutaways to Eddie’s face during this bit. I don’t know if I’m supposed to have a say in that but I feel like it’s just not as funny if you can’t actually see how much better looking he is than me.” 

The audience laughs again, and Richie wonders if his answering grin is as ridiculous and lovesick as he feels. “Anyway,” he says, “I married the guy that shot down my comedy dream! That’s what I was trying to get at. I met my husband thirty years ago, if you can -“ 

The crowd roars again, so loudly it cuts him off. “No!” Richie protests quickly. “Are you kidding? Don’t cheer for that. It makes me sound old as shit. Our anniversary was two weeks ago. You can cheer for that instead.” 

They do. A couple of people whistle, and Richie grins so widely he’s sure he looks a bit ridiculous. “I know! Do you know how long we’ve been married? Twenty two fucking years. We went on our first date when we were thirteen, and now -“ 

The crowd cheers for him again, and he nudges his glasses back up his nose with a grin. “Yeah, yeah. It was a hundred years ago, I get it. We’re old now. We went on our first date when we were thirteen, and it was just _terrible_. It was so bad. I was so nervous that I actually threw up on the table. I’m not -“ he says, and laughs again at the memory. “I’m not kidding. He sat down across from me and I threw up all over myself. And Eddie -“ he laughs again, shaking his hair out “- Eddie had this thing about germs. He still kind of does, but it’s definitely a bit better now, because now he lets me -“ 

“_Beep beep_!” A familiar voice calls from the audience, and Richie winks down at Eddie, who’s got his hands cupped around his mouth. 

“I’m getting word that I’m not allowed to tell this joke,” he tells the audience, “but it was gonna be about eating ass, if that wasn’t clear.” 

The crowd laughs, and as Richie watches, Eddie drops his head into his hands again. He grins again, pushing his hair back. “He was very - he was an interesting kid. I’ve never met anybody else like him before, and I don’t mean that in a romantic way. I mean, he was just - he was so weird. He used to wear a fanny pack, and he’d carry, in his fucking fanny pack, three inhalers. He had his regular inhaler, his emergency inhaler, and a spare. He carried these things with him for _years_. For like, five years, this little dweeb brought three inhalers everywhere with him. And my husband does not have asthma.” 

The crowd erupts into laughter again, and Richie’s smile is crooked as he deadpans, “he is not an asthmatic. He just did shit like that.” 

The crowd laughs again, a roar of a sound that makes something warm and giddy bloom in his chest. “Which tells you everything you need to know about him, doesn’t it? Don’t you feel like you know him now? I don’t even remember where I was going with this,” he admits. “I’m really going off book today. I wasn’t kidding when I said to keep your expectations low.” 

He unscrews the cap on the bottle again, taking a long sip of water before he puts it back down. He pulls the microphone from the stand before he says, “anyway, I’m ancient, I’ve been married for twenty two years, and we’ve never had children. When we got married - we married young, okay? We married the summer after we graduated high school, and we weren’t even thinking about kids. We were still kids ourselves, y’know? And then my husband was in med school, and he was too busy to - yeah!” He says, grinning proudly when the audience cheers so loudly it cuts him off again. “I married a fucking doctor! Can you fucking believe it? He’s an emergency trauma surgeon. He’s not an asthmatic.” 

He scratches the back of his head with one hand, grinning widely as the crowd laughs. “Uh, and med school takes up a lot of time. Apparently it isn’t easy. And actually being a doctor keeps you really busy, and then my job - which is just embarrassing in comparison, by the way. When he takes me to work parties and shit, there’s nothing worse than the people he works with asking me what I do for a living. Have you ever had to look your husband’s boss in the eye and tell that dude you make _jokes_? I have, and it was a fucking nightmare. 

“But anyway,” he continues, when the audience laughs again, “my job is a lot less impressive, but when Eddie was working, I was starting to tour, which meant I was away from home a lot, so the timing was just never right for kids. We’re forty now,” he admits, mostly reluctantly, “and the timing is a bit better, d’you know what I mean? I’m home more, Eddie’s got a bit more free time, everybody in our lives likes to remind us every day that we’re getting any younger, but I’m just - I’m forty now. I’m tired all the time. It’s - I’m not joking!” He insists when the audience laughs again. “I’m a person that falls asleep during movies now. I can’t stay awake through an entire movie anymore, it doesn’t matter where I am. I fell asleep using my fucking phone the other day in like, the middle of the afternoon. I woke up at 9, and my back was fucked up for four days because I slept on the couch for a couple hours. That’s the age that I’m at now. Do I think I could handle a newborn? Not for a fucking second.” 

The crowd erupts into laughter again and he grins, shifting the microphone into his other hand. “I’m fucking serious. Those things, man, they don’t sleep, they’re a lot of work, and I’m too tired for that. So me and my husband - we’ve been looking into adopting an older kid, thirteen or fourteen. At thirteen, y’know, they’re grown, they sleep through the night, they’re a lot less maintenance, it’s like half the fucking work, it’s perfect. My only hang up is that thirteen year olds these days are _mean_.”

A laugh rumbles through the crowd again, and Richie laughs into the microphone. “They’re so mean, man. Not mean like we were when we were kids. I remember being thirteen, and I said a lot of mean shit ‘cause I didn’t know when to shut the fuck up. They called me Trashmouth back then, too, and it was for good fucking reason. But I was mean in a different way. Like, my husband bringing three inhalers everywhere with him - I made fun of him _relentlessly_ for it. For years. And when I found out he didn’t have asthma I made fun of him for that, too. Kids these days are a different kind of mean, for real. They’ll get mean to you about shit you didn’t even know you were sensitive about. 

“That’s what kills me. I had a kid stop me the other day and ask me if I was Trashmouth. And I am, obviously, so I was like yeah, dude, that’s me. And I think this kid’s gonna ask me for a picture or something, but he just tells me, ‘your arms are a lot longer than I thought they’d be’. And then he fucking leaves.” 

Another roar of laughter, and Richie feels so giddy he thinks he could be drunk with the high of it all. “That shit has haunted me since he said it. I genuinely can’t stop thinking about this damn kid. My arms are longer than you thought they’d be? Are you fucking kidding me?

“And it’s worse ‘cause he was right!” He groans, thick with mock outrage as the crowd laughs again. “I asked a friend of mine, a couple of days later, if I had, like, weirdly long arms. And it was - it’s a weird thing to ask as a forty year old man, I get it, but it was really eating away at me. But this fucker just laughs in my face and goes, ‘yeah, dude. You never noticed?’” He throws his arms up, exasperated, as the audience laughs again. “I spent my entire life thinking my arms were proportional to my body. And, I mean, obviously I’m not perfect. You can see me up here, you know I’m a mess. I don’t really brush my hair. I wear this shirt _a lot_. I have a huge mouth. I’ve started getting grey hair! There’s so many obvious things this kid could’ve called me out on but instead he picks something that I didn’t even know was an issue. ‘Your arms are too long’,” he repeats with a scoff. “Who says that to a person? Seriously?” 

The audience laughs again, and it’s so loud it makes Richie feel dizzy with it. “You ask most well adjusted adult men what they’re worried about before they adopt and they have actual concerns, y’know? ‘What if the kid doesn’t adjust well, what if they aren’t happy, what if I’m not a good parent,’ that kinda shit, you know? I’m up here like, _what if the kid is mean to me?_” He rolls his eyes, but his grin is so wide it makes his jaw click. “This is the shit that worries me. But I’m right, okay? Gen Z kids are fucking ruthless. And kids are like Pomeranians, aren’t they? You can’t have just one. You’ve gotta have at least two, but two thirteen year olds could ruin my fucking life. Are you kidding? They’d take one look me and they’d be able to rip me apart. I don’t want to make it sound like I don’t want kids,” he says. “I do, we’re working on it. I’m just so scared we’re gonna bring them home and they’re gonna be able to smell my fear. And once they know you’re afraid, it’s all over. They’re gonna say some shit like, ‘you need to be liked so badly you’re afraid of what a couple of kids are gonna think of you?’, and I’m gonna have to go into hiding. It’s gonna suck.”

He slides the microphone back into the stand to unscrew the cap on the bottle of water. “I think it’d be funny to see what they have to say to Eddie, though,” he adds, taking another long sip before he puts the bottle back down on the stool. “‘Cause he’s pretty perfect, isn’t he? He’s smart, he’s got proportional arms, all that good shit. Gen Z kids, though, man, they know shit. They know just what to say to make you feel bad about yourself. They could say something about his shitty taste in men,” he allows, “but I feel like that’s a little too obvious. They like to call you out on shit that really catches you off guard. I’m kinda hoping they take one look at him and go, ‘you’re not an asthmatic’, because - because he’ll known what it means, and it’ll fucking embarrass him.” 

He grins widely when the crowd laughs, lifting is hand in a sort of half way. “Thank you,” he says, over the sounds of an audience that’s already started to roar with applause. “I’ve been Richie Tozier. Don’t forget to stream this on Netflix.”

The crowd is on their feet for him, and he grins widely as he waves again, before bending at the waist in an overdramatic sort of bow. He blows a kiss to Eddie as the audience cheers even louder for him, and he feels high, giddy, elated with it. It’s an incredible feeling. When he walks backstage, he almost feels lightheaded again. It’s fucking amazing.

**Author's Note:**

> come find me on [tumblr](http://sweetozier.tumblr.com)! im very friendly i promise


End file.
